Kate is Walking
The secret to achieving and destroying inner peace in only eight days
When I walked up the steps of Osaka Station and emerged into a night pulsing with bodies and traffic and lights, I felt panic. I had climbed thousands of steps over the past eight days on the beautiful island of Shikoku. Those leaf-strewn stairways led to shrines, statues and giant Tori gates. These steps led to an intersection so large that my Google Maps suffered an existential crisis trying to locate my body in time and space. I was experiencing a seismic fracturing of the peace I felt while I was hiking. The bustle of Osaka was reaching into my soul and casually squeezing out the fragile serenity I had worked so hard to grasp over miles of mountain trails. I guess that’s the trick with serenity; if I couldn’t bring it with me, did I really have it at all?
Eight days earlier I was dropped unceremoniously on the side of a highway to begin my ‘Pilgrimage’ as an Ohenro, which is the name given to those who seek to visit the 88 temples scattered across the island of Shikoku, and affiliated with Kōbō Daishi, founder of an esoteric sect of Buddhism. I do not identify spiritually as an Ohenro; maybe more Ohenro-adjacent. My route would cover around twenty temples scattered across three picturesque prefectures while the real thing takes 8 weeks and contains sections likely unsuitable for social media. The original trail dates back over 1200 years. At its peak there were thousands of pilgrims walking and worshipping at each temple in turn. Ohenro wear special white robes, a conical hat and hold a staff. The outfit is still commonplace for both Japanese and non-Japanese travellers. Even so, I couldn’t take myself seriously in the hat, and stuck with shorts and a T-shirt. Then and now, pilgrims would stay in temple lodgings, just as I did on my first night. My host monk told me there could be up to 400 worshippers staying at the temple every night back when ascetic pilgrimages were the hot ticket in town, but tonight there were twenty-seven of us.
We twenty-seven pilgrims ate breakfast and dinner together in a simple dining hall. I was seated with two other solo travellers – a shaggy-haired man named Austin from Long Island, and a woman named Kaisa from Finland. Kaisa was in her early 70s, with long straight grey hair, thick glasses and the confident, mystical air of a low-level sorceress. Over dinner I kept noticing that little specks of mascara had marked the inside of her lenses and I badly wanted to wipe them clean for her. I noticed her eyes because I was watching them well up as she told us about the death of her husband just 18 months ago. He was obsessed with Japanese history and had collected over 3000 artefacts and artworks which they kept in their house. Kaisa was walking alone on a healing journey for two weeks in his honour. As she told her story, so matter-of-factly but with an undercurrent of blazing grief, my instinct was to hold her, or somehow reassure her and try to ease her pain. It was early in my travels and I was automatically shifting into doctor mode, or perhaps friend mode, when in reality I was neither. I was just a fellow pilgrim crossing paths with a person’s story. I came to Japan partly because my empathy was fraying with overuse. I needed a break from vicarious suffering and injustice. I observed Kaisa and her fragile grief. She seemed to be doing everything she needed to do to go on living.
The next morning at breakfast Kaisa announced excitedly that she had booked to stay in a capsule hotel in Tokyo. I told her I had heard a lot of them are quite spacious and don’t feel like a coffin at all. I immediately regretted bringing the word ‘coffin’ into breakfast conversation with a recent widow. Keen to change the subject, I looked at Austin’s name card on the table and noticed that when combined with his surname it contained an anagram of ‘Australian’. He said that no one had ever pointed that out before, which pleased me. I did not share that my own anagram was ‘Taste Wine Keg’, a nickname used with recurrent glee by college friends in another lifetime. As the trip went on, I found that time somehow became more porous, and memories like this continued to flood Proust-like into my present.
After the first night at the temple I had a serious day of hiking including three mountain peaks. That was the day I began to get into the groove of walking alone on this enchanting island. Because my itinerary was completely planned out (by an amazing company called Oku Japan) I was able to enjoy my wanderings without much responsibility. Every decision had already been made but there was no one telling me what to do – the magic combination. I let my mind take me down tangents both trivial and profound. Is Alanis Morisette still making music? Are the snakes here poisonous? How do I live a meaningful life in a fundamentally unjust world? Will the next convenience store have the cut-up apple pieces in a packet that I like? As my boots crunched along forest floors and country roads my mind slowly uncluttered like a Marie Kondo closet. It seems that after a certain number of rhythmic footsteps, painstakingly compartmentalised compartments of the past can be cracked open just a fraction to check whether they are still radioactive, or whether enough time has elapsed that they can be pondered safely. More importantly there was space to zone out to the sound of wind in the trees, and recite poetry out-loud with only the birds as an audience, and the occasional snake.
Every morning I would arise from my futon early, the sun sharp through paper thin curtains, and write in my journal by the morning light. I felt safe and contained even though no one I loved knew exactly where I was. The temples were the gentle commas that punctuated my hours of walking. I will tell you about just one, temple 82 Negoro-Ji (Fragrant Root Temple) where I began on my fourth day. Around the main temple (known as the Hondo) there was a quadrangle of enclosed corridors containing 33,000 small statues of budhisattva donated by worshippers. Walking past rows and rows of these statuettes felt like being at a never-ending football match of enlightenment, with bleachers full of happy silent fans lit dimly by hundreds of soft lanterns. The days of hands that went into these temples is palpable. There is a sense of love and belief seared into the structures, carried on today by the monks and the real Ohenro, whom I would watch go through the rituals of lighting candles and incense, depositing coins, ringing the temple bells and reciting sutras. Their actions were equal parts devotion and efficiency.
At this same temple there was a sacred thousand-armed statue that is only viewed every 33 years. I tried to imagine the anticipation of such an event. I wonder if it’s a big to-do or whether one of the monks just whips off the covering and then they go back to sweeping the grounds. What is the meaning of a statue that is almost never seen? Such a concept is so far removed from my world of near instant gratification. I found that many of the temples had these types of shrouded treasures, scheduled for a single lifetime viewing. I came to realise that for certain people waiting can be a form of faith, rather than a form of torture.
In my life I have perfected the skill of creating just the right amount of false urgency to ensure I am always working towards something seemingly mandatory but totally voluntary. On new years’ day this year I tried to think of a word that could be my theme for 2026, and the word that flashed up somewhat annoyingly was ‘patience’. Patience is a quality I am always failing to cultivate, and yet it is something that came so easily in Shikoku. Travelling as an Ohenro is not about the optimisation of anything. I would find myself sitting peaceably on the side of a road in a village, waiting for the single bus of the afternoon to come along. There should be a word to describe the feeling of relief one experiences when another human being appears at a bus stop in a remote area, thus suggesting that the bus you await does exist and will be arriving imminently. In any case, I had absolutely nowhere else to be. I would sit and read and look around me. Sometimes I imagined I was a very small background figure in a landscape painting that was slowly being painted.
Coco must have been Buddhist. She had that calmness about her. When I looked at her I understood deeply that she had never devised an arbitrary goal to work towards with frenetic determination. Coco was a terminally ill 21-year-old tortoiseshell cat who lived in a beautiful riverside ryokan in Kotohira in the Kagawa prefecture. Returning to the inn after a morning hike, I found her lying in the entranceway. She was spending a little moment in the warm spring sunshine. As I approached, cautiously but with naked desperation for contact, Coco stood up tiredly and wandered back inside. My host Hiromi had decorated the ryokan with dozens of little cat statues and tchotchkes; a shrine to the indifferent, enduring Coco.
Kotohira is home to another, more famous and historical Shintō shrine. Japanese people travel from all over the country to visit (although it is not part of the 88-temple trail). To get to the very top you must climb 1368 steps, but it’s only 785 to the main temple complex. It is very good luck to pray at this particular temple. Word on the street is that it’s the only way to guarantee a bountiful rice harvest. In the Edo era an annual ceremony was established where designated carriers would carry those too sick or weak to climb so that they could say their devotions in person. Apparently this practice stopped in 2020 because the carriers were getting too old. This didn’t make any sense to me. If the tradition started in the Edo era (the 1600s), that suggests a continuous generational chain of carriers over the course of 400 years. Were there no more young people with the upper body strength and inclination help those less able? I think it’s more likely that a certain pandemic stymied the whole operation. Back in the Edo era it was also acceptable to send your dog to deliver offerings to the temple and the locals would look after these dogs, known as Konpira-inu. The charm of this information almost counterbalanced my mixed feelings about the retirement of the carrying ceremony. It has only recently occurred to me that my overblown disappointment may have been triggered by a deeper fear about my own ageing body its potential limitations. No-one wants to be carried but it’s nice to know someone would carry you.
Two Japanese school boys I met on a local train had told me that Japanese people call Kotohira Shrine ‘Konpira-san’. There is a complicated historical context to this nickname (which I learned later), but they claimed confidently that it just rolled off the tongue more easily, which was also true. These unbearably young-looking 15-year-olds came to sit with me to practice their English. One of them asked me what my favourite word in Japanese was. I said wakarimasen as a joke, which means ‘I don’t understand’. I’m not sure they understood the joke. When I asked the boy what his favourite English word was, he looked up dreamily then said slowly and with great intention, ‘describe’. His friend asked me whether it was true that everyone was always barefoot in Australia. When I told him it wasn’t true, he pushed back – but what if you are close to the beach? I conceded that yes, some people, who are in close proximity to the beach, may leave their shoes off to go to a nearby shop or café. Later when I asked why he chose his current school he said it was the only one where you didn’t have to wear shoes.
The boys kindly recommended a restaurant near my accommodation and made some suggestions for local specialties to try. I dutifully went to the restaurant, a warm and busy izakaya, and despite the pictures on the menu, proceeded to order chicken livers by mistake. I was too embarrassed to re-order, only looking jealously at the Japanese business man next to me who ordered the correct chicken special, which steamed temptingly on its hotplate.
After the livers, after the temples, after the onsens, after countless convenience store onigiri, after the waterfalls and after all the lovely people who pretended to understand my Japanese, arriving in Osaka was an assault. My inner Coco just melted under the streetlights. I spent the rest of my time in Japan and the time since I returned home trying to recapture a sense of space in my mental closet, even just a shelf, to carry with me. I don’t want Shikoku to be an island; I want it to be contiguous with my every day reality. Writing helps build that bridge, as does breathing and waiting for buses.
A new season of a television show I like came out but it is not yet available in Australia. I can’t run a race that I have been meticulously planning for a year. The world is unequal and driven by malign forces. Patients are late and they have problems I can’t fix. A friend didn’t text me back straight away and what does that mean. But there are people who wait 33 years to see a statue they say has a thousand arms. So there is that.
The photos really enhanced the words. Just beautiful